Legendary documentarian Frederick Wiseman turns his patient, fixed camera on the Queens neighborhood of Jackson Heights, and the result is something like television’s Parks and Recreation: The Director’s Cut (and not only because this runs 190 minutes). With extended, lightly edited scenes of community planning sessions and activist meetings, In Jackson Heights documents the grinding gears of street-level democracy in one of the most diverse neighborhoods on the planet. It’s endlessly fascinating and enormously hopeful. Even as challenges arise, whether it’s from being a small business owner in the face of gentrification or from being an undocumented citizen, the people onscreen work together to create a place that is for more representative of the American dream than any gated McMansion “community.” Sure, Wiseman is slightly stacking the deck here, as there aren’t many instances of conflict among the residents, who almost uniformly come off as reasonable, intelligent and well-mannered. Still, it’s hard to begrudge him the urge to inject a tiny bit of feel-good fantasy into this otherwise monumental dose of reality.
